Posted
by
timothyon Saturday July 23, 2011 @12:59AM
from the such-funny-names dept.

luceth writes "According to Android Police, the Google Music library manager now supports Linux! Also available in the Linux upload manager is new support for Ogg Vorbis, though they transcode it to 320 Kbps MP3 like they do with FLAC. Still, it will be nice to get some use out of that beta invite."

I think I'll wait until hell freezes over. I'll keep my data stored on my own devices; storage is dirt cheap and the storage devices are very small these days. I just don't see any advantage to uploading my music to anybody, especially Google since they yanked my mcgrew@gmail.com address a few years ago with no explanation or recourse; I'd used it to correspond with friends and family, sign up for subscriptions to/. and such but that was all. I'd hate to have half of my music on Google and have it just di

Can you prove you got it legally? Hell, most of my CDs are burned from sampled LPs and cassettes.

There's a deliberate joke on Skynard's Second Helping LP that AFAIK is not there on the remixed CD. At the beginning of "Working' for MCA" there's a deliberate bit of noise making fun of the record company; a very quiet "schwing!" followed by a 60 hz (plus harmonics) hum like you would get from a badly shielded cable.

Anything that was originally analog but digitally remixed for CD is crap; at least, what I've he

Yes, that is the rub - but if I genuinely had a legal copy I'd upload to the service. I doubt it would be in a record label's interest to pursue a court case like that when I can provide hard copies of each album. It's unreasonable (and I think a court would back this up) to expect me to retain the receipt for each CD. Even if the court viewed that suspiciously, there would be thousands of easier targets that would be less expensive and lower risk (for them).

One of the easiest things to do is fling music across the net. You can do it with Apache and DynDNS and roll your own or you can do something else.

Rolling my own with Apache is not difficult (I've done it) but is not likely what Joe User is going to do. Opera Unite is drool proof - it even makes a domain service like DynDNS superfluous. Plus it's been running on Linux since forever ago, it seems.

A lot of NAS appliances offer this too. Some also have dedicated iPhone and Android apps -- though the quality probably varies a lot. Still, I personally find the Google Music app to be subpar on Android. It's gotten a lot better, but worse too in many ways. Some things require too many clicks/taps - and I dont really need a dynamic colored background or the little dropdown context menu. It seems somewhere alone the lines the UI designers forgot they were designing for touchscreens./endramble

It's about as easy as falling off a log. Really. I don't know how anyone can make it any easier. You turn it on, create a name for yourself, and point it at your music directory, and boom, you're done. It even penetrates firewalls like Skype. You don't even have to open ports or anything.

It is the best, by far, ad-hoc "server" software going.

You should try it.

Uploading gigabytes of music to a cloud server is orders of magnitude more difficult and ti

Mind if I ask what possible reason you could have for being anti-Opera?

They're a good company, and are pretty close to acheiving the "do no evil" motto of another company that likes to walk on the border of questionable morality, but never cross it.

The only possible thing I can conceivable come up with is that they are not open source and don't seem to contribute to OS projects. To that I can only shrug. They've had a linux client for years. I've been using linux long enough to remember when opera was a probably the best browser in the repos. (still is if you're on an older system).

They have a mobile browser that works across all mobile operating systems, including maemo. And not just some desktop knock off that strains resources, but one with a small footprint. Webpages can be run through their own proxies that convert normal webpages into mobile friendly versions to minimize mobile bandwidth costs. They even made browsers for the Nintendo ds and wii.

Supporting so many platforms is a huge feat that not even google can boast of. Opera is a pretty cool company, in my opinion. They can keep their source code.

All right, but apart from a browser that is lightweight, innovative, portable - both for mobile platforms and Linux -, comes with an embedded webserver, tons of extensions, and has a high score on the acid test, what have Opera Software ever done for us?

Taking your stuff and selling it back to you has been the model for every big business since the '80s. Whether it's privatising industry, spectrum, or sequences of 0s and 1s, it's essential to create artificial scarcity in order that the powerful retain their rightful position.

yo do not even need to roll your own. Just use Ampache [ampache.org], and host it yourself. There are Android and boxee clients. I no longer use satellite radio since I stream everything to my phone for long drives..

iPhone didn't do anything that you couldn't already do with Symbian or WinMo, either (in fact, it still does less in many areas). Didn't stop it from becoming the single best selling smartphone in a very short time.

I'd love to try it out, but once again it's only US and we Canadians can't play yet. We're still waiting for Google voice too, although I doubt that's their fault, and more likely related to our telecom providers. Damn nice to see a little Linux love, between this, Adobe's 64 bit flash player, and the supposed support for OnLive coming in the future.

Why? mp3's are small. Just get yourself a portable player with an 80GB (or larger) hard drive and you'll be set for months of uninterrupted music.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see any practical value to this service. Maybe if it let you stuff blurays into it, that would be something. But just dinky little music files? Especially when it transcodes it to mp3 so you can't ever get the original back out? What good is that?

Practical value: Access to your entire music collection on your Android phone, your Android tablet, and anywhere you can open a web browser, all without having to remember to upload the files to each device individually (or taking up the precious limited space on your phone or tablet.) I have an iPod with plenty of space for most of my collection, but if the battery dies or I forget it, I have a backup plan if I want to listen to music (it's happened to me recently, and it was nice to have that backup.) An

Sooooo let me get this straight. You take your phone, the thing you kinda really need for people to get a hold of you, for emergencies, etc, and run the battery down by using it as an MP3 player, because while you're not too cheap to buy a several hundred dollar Android smartphone you ARE to cheap to buy a $150 MP3 player?

Maybe I'm just weird, because I don't get it. I have a 4Gb Sandisk, gets 27 hours on a single AAA, and at 64Kb (which frankly with all the outside noise when I'm out and about is the best

Personally, I DO carry an MP3 player for the same reason I also carry a camera and watch: convenience.

It's much better to run down the battery in my MP3 player than my phone. It's much better if I damage or lose my MP3 player than my phone. It's much better to listen to music on my MP3 player because no phone has sound quality like it.

The same things apply for my camera, only for images instead of music.

Looking at a watch is vastly more convenient than having to break out the phone whenever I need

Now I have an Android smartphone. I generally get ~24 hours out of it between charges, though I plug it in every night. Playing music with it consumes almost no battery - optimized hardware decode paths and all that. I can play music for a couple hours and still be at 80-90% battery - which is enough to last me until the next morning, if need be.

I wouldn't call it a "sub par" player, either, I don't know why that is assumed. It has all the us

I'm getting right around 13 hours on my phone with 9-10 of that being google music streaming. I can do the same battery tiimes with slacker as well. Also since I sit at my desk mostly all day, i could always plug my phone into the computer to charge it if i wanted.

I've dropped point and shoot cameras for everything outside of camping for my cell, my watch is also my cell, my mp3 player too.

Well when I'm using it I'm either out walking (can't jog after getting my knee torn up in a bike wreck) or doing a service call and in those situations I have so much background noise and other crap that frankly anything higher is just being wasted.

Now at home? That is a completely different story. I have everything in 320k either running to my cans or to my old 80s stereo through the aux input but sadly since moving into my apt I don't get to blast the big old Pioneer anymore and will probably end up givin

The problem I have with the phone players is I always seem to end up in an "either or" problem. it is 3AM, I just got the gear packed away after doing a great show at the club, I need to wander around the streets to burn off some of this energy and...crap. My phone has like 12% charge. I can either listen to tunes and not have a phone when it dies, or have a phone and not listen to tunes.

With the Sandisk I just walk into the corner gas station and say "Hey where are the AAA batteries at?" and most of the l

I have limited upstream bandwidth (abour 32kBs before other things slow down), most of the solutions I have seen have no way to control the rate at which they consume bandwidth from the server. Also there is no way i could host 2-3 devices at the same time with a home grown solution.

In my own home, I stream locally over NFS/CIFS and it works great, but for outside my home i'm better off letting google handle the bandwidth.

Well that's awesome for you then. I, however, don't have a 3TB XP box sitting in my apartment full of FLAC, and the desire to set this all up myself. This service is obviously not for people that like to roll their own.

Being able to access your collection from multiple devices from anywhere with an internet connection is the major draw of Subsonic [subsonic.org]. I'm still trying it out and deciding if it's awesome or just kinda cool, but so far I'm liking not having to upload everything to the cloud first.

As long as it's tested and supported (well, Google levels of support, which aren't exactly great), who cares?

Although I do use the Windows version of Picasa with Wine instead of the version wrapped by Google, but that's because they're lagging the versions behind (the Linux 'port' still doesn't support facial recognition).

It's a small package, with no dependencies on Wine, only on packages that I already had installed on Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit. It works quite smoothly. The only hitch is that it tries to use the notification area, which doesn't exist in Ubuntu 11.04's Unity interface.

Google offers a number of applications for Linux, and has repositories for current versions of Ubuntu. Google claims to use OS X and their own rebranded version of Google internally more than they use Windows, so it's only surprising that there was

I've only really tried it a couple times, but: In my house where I don't get that great a 3G signal, I had a hard time getting a whole song to actually play (buffering...buffering.) Granted that was not too long after it launched. Tried it again just now, and seemed to work great, downloaded a whole 3:20 song in about 30 seconds and had no pauses. Only two points of data, but take it for what it's worth.:)

Turning on WiFi on the phone, it works perfectly, with only about 5-10 seconds pause at the start

They already know of this. Google asked them for a license on reasonable terms, but eventually gave up (on "reasonable"). Sometimes I wonder if that Google engineer who flipped the "go online" key did it with his middle finger.

What's so special about google music compared to something like grooveshark?

I could already upload all my music to grooveshark and listen to it from any computer and there is also a mobile app for devices that don't support flash like the iPhone and iPad.

What makes grooveshark better than google music IMO is that with grooveshark you don't even need to upload much of your music because it's already all there since you essentially have access to everyone's uploaded tracks. But you can still upload your own i

Grooveshark's business model appears to be based on blatantly infringing copyright, then hoping they can negotiate deals with the record labels. Google Music is based on doing something that probably isn't copyright infringement (although the RIAA may disagree), backed up by Google's lawyers. I like Grooveshark, but I don't know that it's going to be around for very long.

If I recall correctly, OGG and MP3 use very different (lossy) compression techniques.

That is true.

As a result, converting from one to the other will drop audio quality substantially.

That is false. Converting to any lossy format causes a change from the original source, of course, but there's no reason why it becomes magically worse in these circumstances. You'll see about the same amount of change on average regardless of whether the starting waveform was direct from a ADC, from an MP3 decoder, from an OGG decoder, or whatever. Whether that constitutes a "drop in audio quality" is debatable -- sometimes its actually an improvement, but then "audio quality" is a bit subj

Both OGG and MP3 lossy compression techniques work by sacrificing aspects of the original waveform that often go unnoticed by the human ear. Some approaches even take advantage of what's considered the auditory equivalent of optical illusions, removing large chucks of audio information which, due to how the human ear and brain processes audio, go by almost completely unnoticed. It's actually pretty cool:)

My point is, from what I read a couple of years ago, many of the more ambitions compression technique

While it is a little silly (for multiple reasons) to transcode ogg, in my experience, oggs look more like lossless codecs that just have a more finely tuned filter on low volume sounds. MP3 throws out the high frequency spectrum to lose data, where ogg just throws out low amplitude data. Image compression analogy: mp3 is like changing the image resolution, ogg is like the full scale original just with some of the dark sections set to #000000 instead of something like #010101.

This is Google we're talking about. This service must have thousands of users already, if not tens of thousands; the numbers will be multiplied many times over when it's a fully open beta, and more when it's fully released.

So what's the RIAA going to do? Subpoena the music lists for all the tens or hundreds of thousands of users, and send investigators to each home, to check whether there's a CD for each album, or a record of a download license from Amazon or eMusic or iTunes or some other service? Even in

google needs to convert the Ogg Vorbis files over to MP3, which is neither free nor better. What is the reasoning behind this? Would implementing basic support for Ogg Vorbis be beyond the magical powers of google, or did they have to strike up some evil pact of exclusivity and goat sacrifice with the people who own the MP3 patent in order that their product would have a familiar/attractive format de/compression capability?

Manufacturers that support it in their players also tend to be more attentive to the needs of their more technical users. iOS doesn't have native Vorbis support ; Android does. Samsung supports it in their YP range. iRiver support it (and their players tend to have excellent audio quality too). So it's something of an interesting litmus test of the general tech-savvy of a given manufacturer.